The student revolt of 1967 to 1974, which finally expired about
1978, retains its fascination and much of its significance in the
twenty-first century. But the seven or so years which preceded it are
often passed over as simply a precursor, the incubation of a subsequent
explosion; they deserve a higher status.

The concentration of interest on the late 1960s and early 1970s
arises from the driving role of students in the cultural revolution
whose traumatic impact still echoes with us. As late as 2005 some
commentators saw federal legislation introducing Voluntary Student
Unionism as the culmination of struggles in the 1970s when Deputy Prime
Minister Costello and Health Minister Abbott battled their radical
enemies. Interest in these turbulent years at a popular, non-academic
level has produced a succession of nostalgic reminiscences. In the
Sydney Morning Herald's 'Good Weekend' for 13 December
2003 Mark Dapin pondered whether the Melbourne Maoists had changed their
world views ('Living by the Little Red book'.) In the Sydney
University Gazette of October 1995 Andrew West asserted that the campus
radicals of the 1960s and '70s had remained true to their basic
beliefs ('Not finished fighting'.) Some years later, in April
2003, the editor of that journal invited me to discuss 'Where have
all the rebels gone?' My answer treated this as a twofold question:
What has happened to the former rebels? Why have the students of today
abandoned radicalism?

Very properly, the student revolt's key role in what was in
many respects a disastrous turn in western civilisation should ensure
its place in academic studies. But the early and mid-1960s, often
treated as a prelude, had a distinctive rationale. I myself possibly
under-estimated the distinctive features of 1960-67 in my 2002 book on
radical students and the old left at Sydney University. Perhaps I was
too anxious to reach my terminus, 1967!

The following re-examination considers varying interpretations of
the student movement at Sydney from about 1960 to about 1967 advanced by
different investigators. A background sketch of the University context
then leads on to an analysis of the contribution made by student clubs
and by student publications to the revival of activism. This permits
some closing generalisations about the interpretation of this period.

A neglected and misunderstood topic

'Rudimentary' was how Donald Beer, a lecturer at the
University of New England, categorised the historiography of Australian
university student life in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
He was writing in 1996. Despite some new work in this field, seven years
later Graham Hastings, Education Research Co-ordinator for the National
Union of Students, also remarked on the neglect of the history of
Australian student activism. Indeed, he said, American student activism
was better known. (1)

Beer complained that discussion of student activities was often
relegated to an isolated chapter in a broader context. Many writers saw
the same motivations governing the whole ten years 1960-1970. Others saw
1960 to 1967 as a unity but characterised it as 'a period of
transition in Australian universities generally'. Yet others saw
these seven years as bifurcated about 1964-65. The accepted view, then
and now, was that Australian universities were quiescent during the
1950s for several reasons: the Cold War discouraged political
enthusiasm, undergraduates had become more interested in personal and
religious matters, and an inadequate secondary education forced them to
concentrate on their studies. Political clubs were out of favour,
religious societies flourished. According to Beer, this explains why in
the early 1960s most socially-conscious students took a moral rather
than directly political view of public life. The most obvious moral
issues were racial, though liberal views like opposition to censorship
also attracted support.

Hastings does not explain the passivity of 'the silent
generation' of the 1950s. He attributes the radicalism of the
sixties to the fact that students were no longer solely middle class.
Their mixed social origins introduced ideological confusion.
'Contradictions between the dominant ideologies students are
expected to transmit in their professional careers and their own
experiences can become rarefied and students can react with moral
indignation'. (2)

Most writers recognised that the dynamics of revolt varied
according to location. Some analysts concentrated on the demonstrations
and neglected the controversies in student journals and magazines. Some
underestimated the impact of individuals. Some neglected the role of
clubs and societies. Some accounts of the student revolt came from
participants writing as protagonists, others wrote as academics or
journalists. Some shared the interpretative approach of one or more of
these categories. I will examine the views of six authors who refer
specifically to activists at Sydney University between 1960 and 1967.

The Australian New Left: Critical Essays and Strategy, edited by
Richard Gordon and published in 1970, devotes two chapters to students
in the 1960s. The more valuable, Chapter 1, 'An Overview of the
Australian New Left' by Richard Gordon and Warren Osmond,
concentrates on Sydney University and identifies three phases of
development, 1961-65, 1965-67, and 1967-70. Gordon was a former student
activist, and teaching fellow at Monash University; Osmond, a tutor at
Sydney University, formerly attended Monash and Adelaide universities.
In Chapter 6, 'Toward Self-awareness', Osmond attempts a
sociological explanation of the student movement in Australia, but
refers also to the background crisis in liberalism and education. He
reiterated his views in a Current Affairs Bulletin of September 1970,
again identifying three periods: 1960-64, 1965-66, and 1966-70. (3)

There is a long silence till 1995, when W. F. Connell, former
professor of education at Sydney and a foremost advocate of progressive,
child-centred, education, wrote the chapter on 'The University
Communities in the 1960s and 1970s' in Australia's First, the
commemorative history of Sydney University. He gives only nine
paragraphs to 1960-67, remarking on the slow development of serious
protest amongst students, which 'had simmered in a general
atmosphere of increased but sporadic social awareness and criticism
since the beginnings of the 1960s'. (4)

Anne Coombs' Sex and Anarchy: The life and death of the Sydney
Push, was published a year later. Coombes, a journalist turned full-time
writer, concentrates on individuals and ideas in the Libertarian Society
and the Push, the group of bohemians for whom the Libertarians provided
an intellectual core. Chapter 10, 'The Times They Are a
Changing', concerned with the period 1958-67, sees a melding of
overseas and Australian features, with the western world inundated by a
human tidal wave, the 'baby boomers' then reaching adulthood.
Post-war prosperity and security made them affluent, carefree and ready
to be rebellious. (But were the 1960s secure? And why did prosperity not
engender conservatism?) She sees the early 1960s as a hopeful era, the
years of the civil rights movement and the end of colonialism on Africa.
But it was also the time of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa and
the Cold War. In Australia by the mid-1960s 40 per cent of the
population was under twenty years of age. Change started only in 1964,
when the visit of the Beatles initiated 'youth culture'. In
advocating free love and opposition to authority The Push and the
Libertarians anticipated the new post-1968 morality. But the adoption of
many of their ideas by society undermined their raison d'etre. The
book has little to say on student politics - most Libertarians preferred
parties to politics. (5)

In Greer, Untamed Shrew (1997) Christine Wallace, a journalist,
gave some attention to individuals associated with student journalism,
literary ideas and the Push. Germaine Greer was a postgraduate student
and then, in 1963 and 1964, a senior tutor at Sydney University. Wallace
recognises that 'friction between the seeming moral homogeneity of
the 1950s and the heterogeneity of the later 1960s began earlier than is
generally understood'. (6)

My own Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University (2002)
concentrated on the forty years 1921-1961. My driving motive was to
chronicle the glories of the 1941-1948 renaissance in student life, (in
abeyance in the dark war years of 1942 and 1943.) I was heavily involved
in this upsurge as secretary of the Labour Club, co-editor of Honi Soit,
and general secretary of the National Union of Australian University
Students (NUAUS). I disposed of the 1960s at the tail end of my book, in
five or six pages, interposing the sub-head 'Harbingers of a Second
New Left' between four long paragraphs on the Libertarian Society
and two short ones on changes in the communist movement relevant to
changes in student political clubs. I saw the revived student activity
of 1960-67 as 'focusing more on social rather than socialist
causes. (7)

Ann Curthoys wrote both as a former participant and an academic
researcher in her 2002 book Freedom Ride: A freedom rider remembers.
This account of the freedom ride by twenty-nine students from Sydney
University in February 1965 names many individuals, while its index
contains frequent references to the ALP Club, the Labour Club and the
Student Christian Movement. In her overview of 1961-1964 Curthoys
discusses the anti-racist orientation of the dawning discontent. She
contrasts the speed with which Australian students took up the cause of
South African and even American negroes with their rather belated
concern for Australian Aborigines. She sees the Freedom Ride both as a
turning point in race relations in Australia and as a precursor of the
second, post-1967, New Left. It marked the transition from the quietude
of the Cold War years to the new activism of the 1960s, which was
cultural as much as political. (8)

A second group of five books or articles makes only passing
reference to Sydney University in the early and mid-1960s in the course
of a broader sweep of student politics. But some of them illuminate
these years by their stimulating analyses of the educational, social or
political background.

It is Right to Rebel gives a 'Maoist' view of events at
Monash University. Published in 1972 and edited by Michael Hyde, its
very title echoes Mao's ideology. The first few pages sketch the
1961-66 scene, particularly in Victoria, suggesting that 'academic
liberalism', encouraged by events in America and England, had
produced 'a tame form of activism' in Australian universities.
(9)

Christopher Rootes, an academic sociologist, was less committed to
the radical position. He wrote on student radicalism in the Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Sociology in 1978, in Theory and Society in
1980, and in Social Alternatives in 1981. His most considered analysis,
'The Development of Radical Student Movements and their
Sequelae', appeared in the Australian Journal of Politics and
History in 1988. Rootes sketches activism in its four main centres,
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. He challenges two popular
stereotypes: that the movement was purely imitative of overseas
(American) examples and that it was the product of a nation-wide network
of radical (presumably Marxist) student groups. Although he encapsulates
1961-67 under the subhead 'precursors', he emphasises the
distinctive religious and moral elements of the early 1960s. He
concludes that, 'contrary to Gordon and Osmond', the
developments of 1967-70 were 'in large part a parallel to overseas
developments rather than products of any continuous local
tradition'. (10)

Rivalling Rootes in importance is Barry York, whose Student Revolt:
La Trobe University 1967 to 1973 was published in 1989. York, a former
Maoist, prefaces his examination of events at La Trobe with three
background chapters, valuable despite a blurring of the early and
mid-1960s with later developments. York distinguishes between
revolutionary and reformist currents, and between in-campus and
off-campus protests. He remarks that both behavioural scientists and
Marxists were confounded by these movements; nobody predicted the
sixties' upsurge, when 'youth as a whole seemed to be in
rebellion against the ways of the old'. He identifies two main
types of analysts--the Sympathizers, who discerned the sources of
dissent in the circumstances surrounding students (Vietnam, the
generation gap, alienation, civil rights, etc.) and the Critics,
'who sought to blame' the students themselves (permissiveness,
irresponsibility, excessive affluence, family pathology, and so on).
York sees many differences between the Australian and American
situations, but recognises one frequently overlooked common
phenomenon--the crisis in educational philosophy. The classical notion
of educating the whole man was redundant: 'not only did
universities expand enormously, their direction moved away from
traditional liberal models to technocratic managerial ones'. (11)

Donald Beer's concern was to challenge the view that campus
life at the University of New England between 1964 and 1969 was
conservative and sleepy. His 1996 article in the History of Education
Review starts in 1963, when the University Council 'attempted to
re-assert the crumbling sexual standards of the 1950s'. (12) The
Australia-wide rebellion finally erupted at New England in 1969. Beer
concedes that geographical and political isolation encouraged New
Englanders to concentrate on local and immediate issues, such as
room-visiting in the residential colleges. He also notes that the
absence of extremist clubs meant that leadership fell to the
Students' Representative Council, which adopted a cautious stance.
While aware of questions of social conscience, such as race and
underdeveloped countries, Armidale activists were mainly concerned with
three major issues in rather different rank-order than elsewhere: the
University's role in loco parentis; conscription and Vietnam; and
the University's teaching and government. (13)

Both unexpected and distinctive is Mick Armstrong's 1,2,3,
What We Fighting For: The Australian student movement from its origins
to the 1970s, published in 2001 by a Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist
splinter group in Melbourne. Like Rootes and Hastings, he takes an
Australia-wide span. His book is scrupulously researched, utilising both
primary and secondary sources, properly acknowledged in endnotes. His
brief reference to the early 1960s sees discontent as arising from
inadequate material resources within universities and rejection of an
education often boring, irrelevant and stifling 'creative and
critical intelligence'. In the early 1960s the only anti-Stalinist
revolutionary socialists on campus were a handful of Trotskyists in the
Sydney University Labour Club. The predominant politics were
'small-l' liberal: students bearing moral witness, concerned
about the state of society beyond the campus gate. 'In part, this
was a moral revolution'. Yet the period up to 1965 was a
significant break from 'the conformism and careerism' of the
fifties. A new contingent of activists was challenging the conservative
consensus of both Liberal and Labor on issues such as the White
Australia Policy. (14)

In It Can't Happen Here (2003) Graham Hastings, like many
other writers, retained a radical, semi-Marxian, functional or
utilitarian purpose, taking as models New Left humanist Marxists like
E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. Hastings was a member of the expanded
student bureaucracy and much of his massive 325-page book is a history
of that bureaucracy from 1971 onwards. He has almost nothing to say on
Sydney University before 1968, but does throw light on the sources of
student rebellion in the 1960s. He sees two major sources of the
world-wide wave of student protest: the rapid growth of the higher
education and the changing role of education and the universities in
society. He notes York's point that the unexpected rejection of the
old came from a generation 'which was arguably the most affluent
and healthy of all time'. (15)

Hastings argues that the mixed origins and status of students made
them a transitional group. Their sense of alienation could produce an
escapist culture (alcohol and drugs) but also sparked protest movements.
The transitional relationship between students and different classes
could produce ideological confusion. The post-war baby boom had produced
a teenage market in the 1950s and 60s. 'The counter-culture aspect
of the youth market began to move tangentially away from the political
left with which it had once been blurred ... A number of campuses began
to manipulate this split to divert serious student protest into a
"fun" revolution'. Nevertheless the brief marriage
between the political left and the counter culture had an explosive
impact on the youth of most Western societies. (16)

Donald Horne's Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72 (1980)
addresses essential aspects of social change: the permissive society,
youth power, the protest movement, and 'affluence--the rise of the
new middle class'. But he adheres strictly to his period, the years
prior to 1966 are neglected.

From Monash came Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett's Seizures of
Youth: The Sixties and Australia (1991). Like Horne they present vivid
word-pictures of disobedient youth. Unlike Horne they focus on the whole
decade, but move frequently to and fro in time and place, though
limiting themselves to Sydney, Melbourne and Monash universities. They
agree that the 1960s generation was a lucky one. Post-war prosperity,
the boom in education, and healthy employment prospects made political
activism a comfortable indulgence. They see the disturbance of the Coral
Sea Week at the Cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney, in March 1960 as
foreshadowing future struggles. They note the incensed public reaction
when in 1960 Honi Soit attacked Anzac Day as an 'annual ritual of
national narcissism-cum-Bacchanalian revel', and that Honi Soit had
published a similar article, bringing a similar reaction, two years
before. They see the role of Student Action in the 1961 election
campaign as a watershed. (17)

An examination of the new activism at Sydney University requires a
glance at the situation there about 1960.

Sydney University on the eve

In 1960 enrolments at Sydney University reached 11,869, exceeding
the post-war peak of 1948. Arts, the faculty most likely to nurture
socially-conscious radicals, had 3433 students; 40 per cent attended at
night, 49 per cent were women. (18) Evening students, and perhaps women,
were less likely to be activists. While numerous student clubs existed
in 1960, only a few, predominantly religious and political, demanded
ideological commitment. The Newman Society, catering for some five or
six hundred Catholics, was the largest, followed by the Evangelical
Union, a fundamentalist Bible-oriented body, with almost as large a
membership. The more liberal Student Christian Movement was smaller.

Apart from the ALP Club with more than a hundred members, the
political clubs were small. The Labour and Democratic Labor clubs had
about 30 members each. The Labour Club had a strong communist presence,
the DLP Club had a Catholic character. The ALP Club supported the
doctrines of the New Left. Honi Soit summed up the new era in its March
1962 headline 'Carnival spirit fades, religion surges'. (19)

A New Left had appeared after 1956, the year in which the communist
leadership in the USSR exposed the crimes of Stalin. Coupled with the
Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution later in the same year,
this led to an exodus of intellectuals, including some students, from
the Communist Party. Originating in England, this first New Left, though
disillusioned with the Soviet Union, retained the hope that, under
militant leadership, the working class might establish a more humanist
socialism based on workers' control of factories. In Australia it
produced a new magazine, Outlook, and won support amongst university ALP
Clubs. The Labour Clubs, still under communist control, did not welcome
these dissidents. At Sydney University other refugees from the Communist
Party turned either to the Trotskyists or the Libertarian Society. (20)
The Libertarian Society, formed in 1951, was active both on campus and
downtown. Their off-campus gatherings in pubs and elsewhere attracted a
retinue of bohemians and hangerson, this broader group being known as
'The Push'.

In the early 1960s the University was still dedicated to the
transmission of the cultural heritage, though qualified by an emphasis
on the encouragement of critical thinking. Welcoming freshers in 1962
the vice-chancellor S. H. Roberts, himself a historian, told them that
Sydney University was willing 'to lead and assist you in your quest
for knowledge and culture', urged them to 'abandon your
subjective opinions and prejudices in exchange for dispassionate thought
and critical enquiry', and welcomed them to a society 'which
devotes itself to a search after knowledge and to passing on to the next
generation the learning and culture it has inherited'. (21)

The liberal humanist curriculum in the Faculty of Arts remained, in
essence, what it had been for almost 50 years. The literary and
historical studies formed its heart. Yet some English lecturers were a
little disturbed at tendencies in America and elsewhere to make the
discipline more contemporary, thus weakening its role in transmitting
the liberal humanist heritage. But for the moment the main change to
English and history at Sydney was a proliferation of courses: the
English Department had grown from 7 lecturers in 1950 offering 11 pass
courses to 17 lecturers, 6 tutors and 24 courses in 1961, the History
Department increased from 6 staff to 16 plus a tutor, the pass courses
from 3 or 4 to 8. (22)

The character of the student intake was changing. In July 1962 the
professor of chemical engineering publicly attacked the illiteracy of
students in his department. Professor Hunter complained of bad grammar
and spelling and said the situation was getting worse. (23) In the
schools the liberal-humanist curriculum had started to decline in the
mid-1950s. This was evidenced by changes in the content of English,
history, French and similar subjects. The drift from humanism was also
expressed in a fall in the proportion of students taking such subjects,
though English remained compulsory at the Intermediate and Leaving
Certificate exams. Geography and economics, however, were attracting
more candidates. Yet the humanities retained a residual strength till
the early 1970s. (24)

In the mid-1960s the Department of English became engrossed in a
debate about its purpose. When Don Anderson joined the Department of
English in 1963 he found it 'dull but liberal and pluralist'.
He co-edited Hermes in his inaugural year at Sydney. He found that Honi
Soit, Hermes and Arna were discussing literary matters which the
Department would not have considered suitable for formal study. (But
surely that had always been the case!) However, in 1963 complacency was
shaken by the arrival from Melbourne of Sam Goldberg as Challis Professor of English Literature. Goldberg remained for five tumultuous
years.

Goldberg had introduced to Australia the ideas of Frank Leavis, the
English literary critic dedicated to maintaining standards in English
literature and criticism. Leavis required literature to have moral value
and to be concerned with the health of society. In Issue 3, 1960, of The
Melbourne Critical Review, which he had helped found, Goldberg wrote:
'These days few of us think that literature will save us, but we
may well wonder if we can save literature'. The discerning
appreciation of art and literature, he said, lay in the hands of a very
small minority, upon whom depended the implicit standards that order the
finer living of an age. (25)

Don Anderson welcomed Goldberg's arrival. 'He brought a
breath of life which some of us inhaled and then rejected'. The
controversy enlivened and split the Department, which resolved matters
by offering students 'A' and 'B' courses. Nearly 30
years later, reviewing an American book, The Death of Literature,
Anderson recalled Goldberg's warnings. Perhaps, he suggested, this
was not a natural death but murder; Departments of Literature were
becoming Departments of Cultural Studies or Schools of Communication.
And perhaps people no longer had the leisure to read good literature.
(26)

Ideological changes were dissolving apathy. Important norms were
collapsing. The Bishop of Woolwich challenged traditional religious and
moral beliefs of Protestants in Honest to God, published by the SCM Press in England in 1963. Speaking in the University's Great Hall,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsay, told students: "It
is possible to be both a Christian and a humanist, giving the full and
genuine meaning to both adjectives." (27) Catholic beliefs were
also scrutinised at the second Vatican Council of 1962-65. Time magazine
spread awareness of the discussion with its 8 April 1966 front cover,
'Is God Dead?' The division between the mores of students and
their parents was growing. A shift of emphasis in popular music from
adult audiences and performers to a younger generation was confirmed by
the visit to Australia in 1964 of the Beatles. In 1965 young men began
to adopt unorthodox long hairstyles. In 1966 young women started to wear
miniskirts and panty hose.

Political change also had resonance amongst students. At an ALP
conference in 1960 the federal leader of the ALP, A.A. Calwell, made
derogatory comments on intellectuals in the Labor movement. Yet this was
the year that Gough Whitlam, the epitome of the new middle-class
laborites, became deputy leader. In 1965 the ALP removed the White
Australia Policy from its platform. The Australian Communist Party split
in 1964, when a small pro-Chinese rival, the Communist Party of
Australia (Marxist-Leninist) emerged in Melbourne. A new, more
sophisticated leadership took over the parent body in 1965. It
jettisoned the Communist Review, replacing it with the Australian Left
Review, aimed at a broader audience. The Party now sought 'a
Coalition of the Left'. (28)

A prescient analysis of 'The Next Wave' of the new-style
intellectuals in the August 1960 Outlook remarked that a million young
Australians were in training, whether they knew it or not, to take over
the future. Kemp Fowler, ex-communist and scientist, forecast an
'Incoherent Rebellion'. Earlier radical generations of
students, he said, were few and penurious. They demonstrated against
authority when it flouted liberties. They were both humanist and
anti-authoritarian. Now students were neither few nor penurious; 80 per
cent of full-time students were exempt from fees and some even had small
living allowances. They no longer needed to campaign about the right to
education. In a society where the worse-paid members lived as well as a
skilled tradesman in the 1930s many other causes had evaporated.
'The issues that excited the students of the thirties have been
won, and the victory seems to have created no more than an extension of
the authoritarian machine they fought'. (29)

New clubs and a new activism

In the early 1960s several clubs challenged the Libertarian
Society's hegemony: the Liberal Club, the Labour Club, the ALP
Club, the Democratic Labor Party Society, the Conservative Association,
and FARICA (World Government Club). The DLP Society, inspired by B. A.
Santamaria's National Civic Council, was very active, as was its
national body, the Australian Democratic Labor Student Federation. (30)

New religious clubs included an Anglican Society, a Seventh-Day
Adventist Society (mainly medical students), and the Baha'i
Society. The new societies did not greatly weaken the three older
religious clubs, the Evangelical Society, the Newman Society and the
Student Christian Movement. Some clubs, such as the Jewish Students
Union, the Greek Society and the Chinese Students' Society,
straddled both religious and ethnic categories. Religious belief could
generate commitment to social and political causes. The few ethnic clubs
were sometimes mildly political, but their Australian-born members
usually accepted the principle of assimilation while trying to maintain
a distinctive identity. (31)

Political activity grew in the early 1960s. A new mode of
organisation appeared: joint sponsorship by both political and
non-political student clubs of meetings, petitions, and demonstrations.
In March 1960, immediately following the Sharpeville massacre in South
Africa, over 1000 students demonstrated in Sydney against the apartheid
system. They were dispersed by the police. A week later at another
student-organised demonstration nine students were arrested--the first
occasion for many years. This second anti-apartheid demonstration was
sponsored by leading members, mostly the secretaries, of twelve
University clubs--the Anglican Society, ALP Club, Speleological Club,
Labour Club, Jewish Students' Union, Liberal Club, Medical Society,
the Trainee Teachers' Association, the Sydney University Dramatic
Society, the Australian Student Labour Federation, and the Newman
Society.

Similarly, a diverse range of political and religious clubs joined
together in September 1962 in the Students' Hanging Committee to
protest against the death sentence on the Victorian murderer Robert
Tait, motivated largely by opposition to capital punishment. This was
party of a new ethic. In fact, Tait's sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment in November. (32)

A similar broad spectrum also supported Student Action for
Aborigines. In 1964 its secretary was Jim Spigelman (Arts III); its
president was Charles Perkins, who became Australia's first
Aboriginal university graduate. In February 1965 Perkins led Student
Action on a 'freedom ride' into northern New South Wales,
ending at Moree. Two-thirds of the 29 student participants came from the
Faculty of Arts and just over one-third from the organised Left. They
included 8 members of the communist-controlled Labour Club, 3 members of
the ALP Club, 2 from the Humanist Society, 1 SCMer, 1 Liberal Club
member and 1, Jim Spigelman, from the Fabian Society, a breakaway from
the ALP Club. (33)

Some 40 years later Ann Curthoys, a communist participant in the
Freedom Ride, assessed it as 'a brief episode in the long history
of Aboriginal people fighting for their rights', but a turning
point in race relations in Australia.

More clearly than any other event, the Freedom Ride signified the
shift from Cold War to the 'Sixties' ... With their willingness to
confront authorities ... the SAFA students were a harbinger of the
New Left and the student revolts of the second half of the 1960s.
They brought to Australia a sense of politics as informed by folk
songs, visual displays and theatricality. There was something very
modern and media-savvy about the Freedom Ride ... (34)

For many of the participants it was their introduction to politics.
After he graduated in 1966 Charles Perkins went on to the national stage
of Aboriginal politics. Jim Spigelman became Gough Whitlam's
principal private secretary 1972-75 and Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of New South Wales in 1998. Ann Curthoys, the daughter of
prominent communists, started the Women's Studies program at the
Australian National University in 1976, returning to Sydney in 1978 to
teach history and social theory at the NSW Institute of Technology. She
took the chair of history at the Australian National University in 1995.
John Powles, founder of the Sydney University Humanist Society,
participated in the demonstrations against the visit of US President L.
B. Johnston in October 1966 and against the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. He taught at Monash Medical School for 16 years.
Hall Greenland became editor of Honi Soit in 1966, then briefly a
teacher, a journalist, and finally an activist in inner city local
politics. (35)

The Libertarians remained aloof from this. Once the most
intellectually vigorous of the moribund student bodies, they were
'by the middle sixties so paralysed in fixed positions as to be
incapable of recognising the independent validity of the new liberation
movements'. They had crumbled into anti-intellectualism, believing
in infallible social and natural laws, certain that their
anti-authoritarianism, permanent opposition, and free sexuality were
alone morally respectable for dissident groups. (36)

In the same year as the Freedom Ride, 1965, a large demonstration
in Sydney in support of the US civil rights movement resulted in some
arrests. But the unity of socially-committed students faded as political
divisions emerged. (37)

Conscription, announced late in 1964, and the Vietnam War injected
new tensions into Australian and student politics. Hostility to American
policy was a sub-text. The first outbreak of militancy was a
demonstration by a few dozen students during the May 1965 Australian
Student Labour Federation conference in Canberra. In 1966 the visit of
President Lyndon Johnson provoked violent clashes between students and
police which received world-wide publicity. Warren Osmond, a tutor in
the Department of Government and a leading theorist and participant in
New Left politics, described how 'the "peace movement",
both in its middle-aged, Communist-oriented wing and its youth wing,
newly activated, closed its ranks behind the militant and spirited, if
chauvinistic and subtly racist, election campaign of Arthur
Calwell'. (38)

Students in Melbourne and Sydney, the major new element working in
Labor Party campaigns, exuded an air of great optimism. The massive
defeat of Labor in the federal election of late 1966, together with the
bitter confrontations with police and the visit of the premier of South
Vietnam, Marshal Ky, to Australia early in January 1967, produced an
escalation of protest. The peace movement split in 1967, largely along
generational lines, leaving student-based groups free to repudiate the
moderate tactics of their older fellow-protesters. They took their new
political concepts into the universities. (39)

Yet few observers or participants discerned any mass revolt. In
September 1966 the SRC conducted a poll of 5,547 students on their
attitude to the Vietnam War: 68 per cent favoured sending troops to
Vietnam and 59 per cent supported conscription in Australia. But only 34
per cent supported the presence of Australian conscripts in Vietnam.
(40) As the 1967 academic year opened Rowan Cahill (Arts III) argued in
the Students' Handbook '67 that if anything happened in
undergraduate life it was not because it was willed by the student body
as a whole. 'It is rather the work of "a minority", the
term the newspaper editorials use, or "an elite", which is the
term I use. Left or Right wing politically, Catholic or Anglican
religiously; atheist, free thinker, libertarian, etc., etc.--it all
boils down to a fraction of the student population'.

Undergraduates anxious to express social or political views or
display their literary talents found four main publications available.
The most important, Honi Soit, the weekly student journal whose editor
was appointed by the Students' Representative Council, was usually
dominated by a liberal-cultural-literary clique which was occasionally
challenged by radical-progressive activists. The Union Recorder,
published weekly by the male-only Sydney University Union (which only
amalgamated with the Women's Union in 1972), was quite formal. Its
masthead promised 'a record of events, past and to come'.
Edited by the Union secretary (i.e. general manager) until 1968, it was
slowly becoming more adventurous. The clubs welcomed the generous space
accorded their reports of addresses at their meetings. But from 1960 The
Union Recorder reduced its attention to student societies; it also
started to print cartoons. Next in importance was Hermes, the annual
student magazine published, like Honi Soit, by the Students'
Representative Council under the nominal supervision of a Director of
Student Publications. Arna, published annually by the Arts Society, was
another vehicle for political and literary views. Hermes and Arna would
soon become victims of the changing cultural climate. Arna failed to
appear in seven of the ten years 1950-60, though in 1961 it resumed
publication in some strength. A fifth publication, whose editors were
appointed by the SRC, was the Student Handbook, from 1960 known as the
Orientation Handbook. It provided in-coming students with a formal
description of university facilities. The editor or editors wrote a
brief welcome, the vice-chancellor and the president of the SRC welcomed
new students more expansively. The SRC published, intermittently, a
Student Songbook; while it throws some oblique light on the University
scene this hardly deserves discussion here. Originally these
publications were free, but by 1961 Hermes, the Songbook and Arna were
being sold, at two shillings each. (41)

Honi Soit, a disputed arena

At the beginning of the '60s Honi Soit was the predominant
student journal in Australia, setting the model of a highly literary,
witty paper. It provided a vehicle for Robert Hughes (the future art
critic), Bruce Beresford (already making films), Clive James, and a
string of poets. (42) It was more interested in culture than politics.
(43) But in 1960 Honi Soit displayed a rarely seen radicalism. David
Ferraro, the editor, was a 'Push' person and was assisted by a
prominent Libertarian, George Molnar. The paper criticised apartheid in
South Africa, bureaucracy at the Teachers' College, the police,
Anzac Day, and Australia's immigration policy. In June Professor
John Anderson, writing on 'The Place of Academies in Modern
Society', delivered a characteristically intransigent message:
'The work of the academic, qua academic, is criticism'.
Ferraro encountered hostility from the literary groups and the
Engineers. He survived a no confidence motion in July, recruited one of
the literary critics, Richard Walsh (Arts), as news editor, and resigned
in September, three weeks before the end of his term of office. For the
next seven years Honi Soit was an arena of struggle between radical
activists, the exponents of literary culture, and sceptical opponents of
both. (44)

The 1961 journal was uncontroversial. Its editors adopted an
extremely low profile, ultimately being identified as Michael Newman and
David Solomon in an obscure notice in June. Richard Walsh had been
revealed as news editor in March, while the final issue unveiled the
names and photos of all staff. Mike Newman, an Arts student, later went
to Britain where he was long active in education. David Solomon had
edited Honi Soit in 1958 and in 1960 had helped David Ferraro with
technical matters. He subsequently became a postgraduate student at the
Australian National University and then a journalist, moving to the
Brisbane Courier-Mail. (45) In 1961 The Mirror, the afternoon paper
published by Consolidated Press, who printed Honi Soit, offered an
annual scholarship of 100 [pounds sterling] ($200) to the editor or
editors of the student journal. This seems to have lapsed after a few
years. From 1966 the SRC gave each editor an expense allowance of $10
per issue, amounting to about $200 a year. Thus ended a thirty-year
tradition of honorary editors. (46)

In 1962 Richard Walsh was co-editor with Peter Grose. Walsh later
became president of the SRC, in 1965-6, by which time he had graduated
in Arts and was in Fifth Year Medicine. He was also co-founder and
co-editor of Oz the satirical monthly magazine, and later still chief of
Kerry Packer's publishing empire, Grose was a future journalist. In
May the SRC sacked the two editors on a variety of unconvincing charges,
such as 'complete lack of responsibility and taste' and
failure to give adequate publicity to SRC activities. The editors were
reinstated, and then resigned. The SRC then appointed Laurie Oakes and
Bob Ellis co-editors. 'Oakes went on to become the doyen of the
Canberra press gallery, Ellis to be the polemical gadfly of his
generation'. (47)

Ellis recounts how in the following year, 1963, he and Jim Coombes,
son of 'Nugget' Coombes, a leading creator of the post-war
welfare state, took over 'and in chaos and hysteria wrecked honi
soit for a generation by letting in the earnest lefties, Hall Greenland
for one, and ending its literary ebullience'. Forty years on
Coombes considered that Ellis's remarks about 'chaos and
hysteria' applied mostly to his own bizarre behaviour. He decamped
to the Blue Mountains, believing that the Cuban Bay of Pigs episode
presaged the nuclear holocaust. Oakes took over for the last few issues.
Hall Greenland was not much in evidence. (48)

Ellis may have been thinking of another politically-adventurous
editor, Michael McDermott, a second year Arts student appointed by the
SRC in June 1964. Like Ferraro, he had Libertarian affinities. While the
paper printed articles mildly critical of Catholics and the Soviet
Union, its main offensive was elsewhere. On 30 June it published an
article by the British Nazi, Colin Jordan, disputing the facts of the
Holocaust, alongside an interview with Arthur Smith, leader of the
National Socialist Party of Australia. In an editorial McDermott
announced that while having 'no sympathy whatsoever' with the
aims of the Australian Nazis, he found the 'standover tactics'
of Jewish groups offensive and defended 'the freedom to openly
express opinions on even the most sacrosanct of subjects'. It was
not irrelevant that local Nazis occasionally attended Push gatherings.
Heated controversy followed, and the SRC, at a meeting attended by
'leading Liberationists', suspended McDermott as editor for
two weeks, by 14 votes to 2. Bob Ellis, a member of the SRC, was one of
the opponents, viewing the move as a dangerous threat to free speech.
(49)

In retrospect 40 years on, Michael McDermott emphasised that he
took on the editorship as an individual, not on behalf of any group or
interest. 'My agenda was simply journalism--of a rather low,
sensationalist sort. It just happened that my Push contacts proved an
abundant source of ideas and material. The Libertarian Society had no
significant following among undergraduates'. (50)

After graduating in Arts, McDermott completed a PhD and lectured
for a year or two at the NSW Institute of Technology, before joining the
staff of Sydney University in 1974 in David Armstrong's Department
of Traditional and Modern Philosophy.

The 1965 Honi Soit, like its 1961 predecessor, was quiet and its
editors invisible. They were finally revealed in the June issue to be
Roderick Macdonald and Richard Nichols.

In 1966 the Trotskyist Hall Greenland, edited Honi Soit. Those who
believed that a literary-cultural clique had dominated the journal for
too long welcomed the change. Reporting at the end of the year that the
Socialist and Labor clubs were to amalgamate, Greenland castigated much
of the activity of the Left as 'habitually aimless, utterly
conventional in its own way and astonishingly limited'.
Accompanying this judgement were inspirational pictures of Marx, Lenin
and Trotsky. (51)

After Hall Greenland's rather explosive tenure the SRC choose
a non-political editor for 1967. Robert Trebor, who enrolled in Arts in
1963 and Medicine in 1967, told freshers he had no policy. They would
not get an intellectual paper, if that meant "crits on crits on
crits." Honi Soit would just happen. If it turned out to be
rubbish, he accepted the blame. Trebor lasted one term. Later in life he
became an author under the name Robert Treborlang, which was probably
his real name. Keith Windschuttle, then 'a leftwing
Whitlamite', took over in Terms 2 and 3. He had in the second half
of 1966 been news editor in Greenland's Honi. Windschuttle, of
course, later became prominent as a defender of traditional history
against theory-driven revisionists and as a critic of widely-propounded
views about Aboriginal-European contact. (52)

Hermes in search of a purpose

In 1960 Hermes was dominated by the literary-cultural group which
had become entrenched in Honi Soit. The editor, John J. Howard,
celebrated the stirrings of 'an urban revolution in Australian
writing', something which could only happen in Sydney, for there
was no other Australian city like it. Many of the articles, stories and
poems were by graduates, such as Edgar Waters, a long-time leftist, John
Douglas Pringle, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and author
of Australian Accent, and David Macmillan, the University archivist.
Clive James and Robert Hughes wrote two of the six stories, and Clive
James and Les Murray were amongst the eleven poets. The latter two were
destined to become internationally known, James as a broadcaster,
cultural commentator and writer, Murray as a poet, critic and editor.

Despite the literary renaissance hailed by Howard, Brian
Sommers' 1961 Hermes was disappointing, quantitatively if not in
quality. It was remarkably thin, its 29 pages offering only one article,
three stories and eight poems. The article, on 'The Roman Theory of
Historical Degeneration', was by Edwin Judge of the History
Department, solicited the more easily because Sommers had just completed
history honours! The fiction and verse were the domain a literary
constellation--Les Murray, Ron Blair, Clive James, Richard Appleton,
Chester (Phillip Graham), and Geoffrey Lehmann.

Les Murray (Arts) and Geoff Lehmann (Arts/Law), moving on from
jointly editing Arna the previous year, brought renewed vigour in 1962.
Richard Appleton solicited contributions for the editors. Appleton had
progressed from the Communist Party to Trotskyism, to the ALP; he was
described by Anne Coombs as an old-style bohemian, part of the literary
Push rather than a Libertarian.53 His efforts for Hermes resulted in a
batch of Andersonian/Push contributors. The eclectic cluster of poets
included Appleton himself, Geoffrey Lehmann, Les Murray, John Croyston,
Mungo MacCallum and Ron Blair, a future editor of Hermes.

The 1963 Hermes, edited by Don Anderson and Neil McPherson, an Arts
graduate, was equally strong. Anderson, recently appointed to the
English Department, was on the fringe of the Push. Complaints that the
University magazine was a vehicle for Arts students had been endemic for
decades. The editors now announced that they would return Hermes to its
proper role, leaving the bulk of the literary material to Arna and Honi
Soit. Yet, finding the quality of material from students outside Arts
'atrocious', they again risked the accusation of pandering to
a literary clique of Arts students. McPherson asserted that many of the
items submitted to them reflected on the state's educational
system. Would-be poets had been indoctrinated into admiring the
technique of free association. 'As for politics: it seems that
no-one is really angry any more, but many are confused'. Ninety per
cent of the articles they printed had been solicited. (54)

Hermes did not appear in 1964, but Honi Soit acclaimed Ron
Blair's 1965 issue. Its 1500 copies were almost sold out by April.
(55) Blair attended the University from 1960 to 1968. He later expressed
his hatred of his Catholic schooling in a 1975 play, 'The Christian
Brothers'. His Hermes included articles on the colourful NSW lawyer
and left-wing Labor politician Clive Evatt and the Marxist archaeologist
Vere Gordon Childe. Richard Walsh, co-editor of Oz, wrote celebrating
its second birthday; he feared it was in danger of becoming part of the
Establishment. Old hands like Mungo MacCallum and Geoffrey Lehmann also
contributed. (56)

Hermes went into recess in 1966, 1967 and 1968. Its final issue (at
least for many years) appeared in 1969. The editors, Brian Freeman and
Albert Moran, with Rowan Cahill as 'Advisor', dated it
1969-70, revealing a justified premonition. Freeman, a Science student
majoring in mathematics and physiology, won the University Medal in
mathematics in 1971. He was the editor and/or co-editor of the
Orientation Handbook for two years, and edited The Union Recorder for a
year. Here he created some controversy, because the Recorder was
perceived to be in opposition to Honi Soit, especially when it ran a
literature competition. Moran was an Arts graduate now studying Fine
Arts. Both were associated with the off-campus Free University. (57)

They announced that Hermes was not to be literary in content:
'a magazine of that kind would be fairly irrelevant to Sydney
University in 1969 and would also have only a minority appeal'.
They sought 'more aggressive' material which would perhaps
lead to action, not liberal, intellectual, humanist products. In fact,
contributors were a melange of radicals, dissident activists, and
others, such as Bob Connell, Don Anderson (and a few other academics)
Jim Spigelman (and a few other legal identities), and Dany Humphreys
(radical/feminist and NUAUS travel officer.) (58)

Arna: a crisis of identity

Arna reappeared in 1961 after an intermittent life in the 1950s. It
was edited by Geoff Lehmann (Law III) and Les Murray (Arts II). This was
a 'National Arts Issue' produced by the SU Arts Society for
the Australian Arts Faculty Association. Most contributors were
graduates. The six articles came from New South Wales, Tasmania,
Victoria and the ACT, and the two stories from Victoria and South
Australia. Twelve of the 18 poems were from NSW, the others from South
Australia, Queensland, and Victoria. The articles were politically
balanced: George Molnar gave 'A Libertarian Viewpoint' on
Zamyatin's We while T.L. Suttor, then writing his doctoral thesis
at the ANU, presented 'Catholicism and the Open Society' as
'An attack on current trends by a prominent Catholic
intellectual'. The verse came from Ian Bedford, Les Murray, Clive
James, Geoffrey Lehmann, Lex Banning, and others. One of the editors of
Honi Soit, Mike Newman, wrote a disparaging review: despite the wider
range of contributors the material was 'surprisingly poor'.
Molnar's was the best article. Three weeks later Honi Soit printed
a second, more positive review. (59)

The 1962 issue, edited by Francis Evers, was also less local,
though this time the bias was to Europe, with contributors from Ireland,
France, Denmark and England. Evers scored a coup with an extract from
Samuel Beckett's most recent novel, translated from the French.
Evers and Beckett were both Dublin-expatriates! Many other contributors
were staff-members of the Faculty of Arts. Evers rejected the view that
only the proven-best should be printed and that these were necessarily
European. 'Yet, we still have affiliations with the European
conscience which we will ignore at our peril'. There is talent in
Australia, he said, though he complained that contributions were
difficult to obtain. Nonetheless, his Arna was larger than the 1961 one,
145 pages as against 60, though more costly at three shillings. (60)

The 1963 issue, edited by Ron Blair, reverted to the slimmed down
model, sustained by the usual run of writers, such as Clive James, Mungo
MacCallum, Les Murray, and Geoffrey Lehmann. Like Hermes, Arna was not
published in 1964. Indeed, the magazine next appeared in 1967, under
Richard Murphy, who himself contributed three of the seven poems. An
effort was made to provide each contribution with a photograph,
illustration, or special design. The magazine's disorientation became even more obvious. In 1973 it adopted a new tack, a specialised
theme of interest to several Arts Departments, and written largely by
staff. In 1973 it examined 'Directions in Linguistics', in
1974, history. The end came with a change in name to New Literature
Review 1975 (Incorporating Arna). And that was that!

The Union Recorder thawing, The Students' Handbook frozen

The Union Recorder was slowly thawing. It began to publish
columnists, even cartoons. By 1965 the Liberal Club was the only
political society submitting notices of future meetings or reports of
past meetings to The Union Recorder. From June 1968 it ceased to be a
record of events, past and future, becoming, the editor said, 'A
magazine of opinion rather than a weekly newspaper. We are setting out
to attract a diversity of contributions from students and staff
alike'. He invited literary efforts in the form of poetry and short
stories. (61)

The Orientation Handbook remained a formal register of institutions
and activities. Renamed the Students' Handbook, edited by T.M.
Burvill and N.T. Rowe, it had an introductory article by A. K. Stout,
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, on 'Academic Freedom'. Yet
the editors were unaware of possible 'winds of change'.
'The most engaging feature of our University's
existence', they wrote, 'seems to be its stability'. In
the 1967 Handbook, edited by Rowan Cahill, all this changed!

Interpretations, old and new

The ideological fluctuations and intermittent life of Hermes and
Arna suggest that a cultural tradition was dying. The two magazines
found difficulty in locating contributors, especially from the
undergraduate body. They depended on former students, staff and
'outside' intellectuals, no longer in touch with university
life. The literati preferred to write for a controversial weekly, Honi
Soit, available without charge and with a mass readership, rather than
for sedate annuals whose relatively few readers had to purchase them.

In the case of Arna the hiatuses may have resulted from problems
within the Arts Society; the Arts Council forced its executive to resign
in October 1962 because of their inactivity. The historian of the
University of Sydney Union attributed the demise of Hermes to its
inability to compete with The Union Recorder and Honi Soit, which by the
end of the 1960s 'were both presenting prose and poetry'. (62)

The interpretations, structures, authorship, publishers, and
publication dates of the literature of student life responded to the
changing politics of the student movement, as well as wider ideological,
social and political changes. Communism collapsed, Maoism withered away,
Trotskyism mutated, economic rationalism transformed society.

The analytical studies appeared in three clusters. The
contemporaries, all with a historical approach, were activists; Richard
Gordon and Warren Osmond in 1970 and Michael Hyde in 1972. The collapse
of the leftist ideological hegemony about 1977 interrupted this line of
narrative.

The ten years 1978-1988 produced only three studies, largely
scholarly rather than political. The powerful analyses of Rootes and
York were both founded on academic theses. Horne's broader yet
impressive overview was more academic than much of his writing. Because
the political writers were now directing their narratives to small niche
audiences, they found it difficult to interest major publishing firms.

The third cluster, from 1989 onwards, wrote in yet another
ideological context. They included Gerster and Bassett, Armstrong,
Connell, Coombes, Beer, Wallace, Barcan, Curthoys, and Hastings. Soviet
communism and its satellites had collapsed and China had nothing to
offer the residual student militants. Another remarkable ideological
change was the victory of neo-liberal 'economic rationalism'.
That an interest still existed in student activists of the 1960s and
1970 may have been sustained by the survival of a quasi-Marxism amongst
some academics and by the continuing intellectual importance of those
two decades. Moreover, as the possibilities of political successes
waned, the academic quality of the interpretations improved. As
victories in the streets became illusory, activists turned to a study of
the past.

Those commentators who saw the slow revival of political activism
after 1960 as initially founded in a changing morality derived from
religion and from new concepts of socialism were on the right track. In
the first four or five years of the decade the religious and the
left-wing politicos were junior partners. A shift occurred about 1965,
as the local and international religious and political scenes changed.
The politicals, though a small minority of the student body, became more
influential. The recasting of their political beliefs was aided by
ideological changes in the major political parties.

The faltering cultural tradition, the waning of the traditional
liberal humanism was evidenced in the uncertain life and varying content
of Hermes and Arna, the competition for control of Honi Soit, and a slow
erosion of the formality and objectivity of The Union Recorder. The
movement of assiduous literary and political activists between the
various university journals was evidence of the minority role of the
agitators. The outbursts of 1967-74 came as a surprise to the students
themselves.

The cultural crisis sometimes occasioned grumbles about the
deteriorating educational quality of new generations of undergraduates.
The new intellect promised to assist the onslaught on traditional
values; but did the counter-culture posit a viable alternative?

(1) D. Beer, 'Doing a Van Winkle? student activism and
attitudes at the University of New England, 1964-69', History of
Education Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 1996, pp. 34-36; G. Hastings, It
Can't Happen Here: a political history of Australian student
activism, Adelaide, The Students' Association of Flinders
University, 2003, p. 4.

(26) Wallace, Greer, p. 118. Alvin Kernan, whose book Anderson
reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 1991, attributed the
death of literature to ideology, the inability of academics to define
literature, the new morality, and the growth of technology.

(31) W. Osmond, Part II of 'The state of student
protest', Current Affairs Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 8, 7 September
1970, pp. 122-8; Gordon and Osmond, 'An Overview of the Australian
New Left', R. Gordon (ed.), The Australian New Left, chapter 1.

(56) Ron Blair later became head of the writing department of the
Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney.

(57) Dr Brian Freeman, School of Anatomy, University of New South
Wales, email letter, 4 November 2002.

(58) editorial, "Who, How and What", Hermes 1969-70.

(59) Honi Soit, 15 June 1961, 6 July 1961.

(60) Arna, 1962, Foreword, p. 13.

(61) John Carrick, acting editor. The editor, John Carter, was on
leave.

(62) Honi Soit, 3 October 1962; J. Wilkie, Amalgamated, But the
Same: a brief history of the first 25 Years of the University of Sydney
Union 1972-1996, Sydney, The University of Sydney Union, 1996, p. 92.

Dr. Alan Barcan is a Conjoint Fellow in the School of Education,
University of Newcastle, NSW, having retired as Associate Professor in
1986. His most recent book is Radical Students: The old left at Sydney
University (MUP 2002). He contributed a chapter on "Ideology and
the Curriculum: to Education and the Ideal (edited by Naomi Smith,
2004). His current research is on the history of education in the Hunter
Valley, NSW. He is also interested in student activism at Sydney
University 1967-78. Email: edarb@alinga.newcastle.edu.au

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